*Declaration of Protest Against the Evictions of Park Squatters in
Utsubo and Osaka-jo Park*

On January 30th, 2006, mobilizing nearly 700 city employees, guardsmen and police against around 20 squatters in Utsubo Park and Osaka-jo Park, Osaka city forced through its eviction through so-called ‘administrative action’.

In the process of eviction, one person was illegitimately arrested on
suspicion of ‘assault’, three were taken away in ambulances (of which
one was a guardsmen with a broken bone that should take a month to
heal), with many suffering contusions and other wounds. Until the last,
our comrades who tried to defend their own tents and huts were pulled
out as the city refused all discussion, and surrounded just steps away
as their homes were shredded and smashed, forced to witness the eviction
of all their belongings.

With rage in our hearts, we denounce this city’s inhuman violence.

No excuse can permit the abduction of our squatter comrades from their
homes, in the brutal cold, and their dispossession onto the streets. In
a city where 200 people die yearly on the streets, when will Osaka city
be satisfied in its expulsion of our comrades?

For the squatters of Utsubo and Osaka-jo, Osaka city had disregarded all
attempts to negotiate and ignored every word, jumping into the eviction
process. The ‘alternative policies’ trotted out amidst the evictions
were the Osaka-jo park shelter and the ‘Aid for Independence’ center,
both of which kick their tenants out after a period of a few months, and
are institutions designed to force people into a precarious, homeless
life. As soon as one checks in and takes down one’s tent, a person is
forced to sign a document swearing that ‘I will not squat again’.

While an occupant, there is no guarantee of finding work. With the
handicaps of old age and an institutional address, the individual passes
through the employment offices and for those who cannot find work they
are labeled as having insufficient drive to ‘help themselves’ and are
once again thrown into the streets. One meal a day, and a 3 meter square
space to move around in, etc. along with a poor living environment, it
is clear that these institutions are only ‘excuses for eviction’.

Knowing this intimately, the great majority of squatters reject the
‘persuasion consultations’ of the city’s administrators for internment,
and along with protesting against this eviction, have demanded to the
city a radical shift in unemployment and welfare policy, one executed
without prejudice. The appeal: ‘Don’t destroy our tents’ will certainly
be broadcast in the media as a sort of ‘selfishness’ which it definitely
is not, on the contrary these are calls for the most basic essentials of
living.

Disregarding even the January 27th court decision which ruled that a
park occupant could legally register his address as his own, Osaka city
pressed on with the eviction, against which an appeal lawsuit was
launched the same day. Without a radical shift in policy, the evictions
will continue, and if the justification for living in a tent is not
recognized, what could possibly result but more deaths on the roadside?

To begin with, who the hell are these ‘World Roses Fair’ and ‘City
Greening Fair’ (in which a massive amount of money has been sunk) even
for? After the preparations for eviction begun on January 11th, and the
truth had come out about a corruption scandal involving the
Yutoritomidori tourism promotion office, four members of the section
chief’s staff were arrested. This office, drenched in dirty politics,
has no justification for trampling on the lives of squatters.

The city’s actions were in the end, not about the 20 people who fought
to the end to protect their tents. Originally there were 40 in Utsubo
park and nearly 700 at Osaka-jo; for these comrades the process of
escalation in the three years since the building of the shelter is in
part the reality of facing death on the streets. It is with their pain
in our hearts that, at this struggle, had Osaka city been permitted to
carry out its agenda, the 10,000 precarious comrades across the city
would have been pushed farther and farther into the eviction crisis; and
therefore, for the 30,000 comrades across the country, the twenty of
Utsubo park as well as comrades converged from across the country fought
until the end.

It was not just our comrades at the site of the struggle. Against the
violence of Osaka city, as protests gathered across the countries and
around the world, voices of encouragement reached us. With the city’s
eviction as an opportunity to come together, if anything our links came
out stronger.

Disregarding the overwhelming accumulation of personnel and equipment
from the city, more than 100 people gathered in the early morning (and
some the night earlier) to contest the 8 a.m. attack, and after six
hours of standing against the city and overturning entirely the city’s
plans of attack, the savagery of the city was unleashed for all to see.
This thirty day fight was possible because of our comrade’s care, the
assistance of many people and our solidarity. We could not stop the
evictions, but we certainly did not lose! (Translator’s note: the
massive money, equipment and personnel expenditure required for Osaka’s
January 30th attack against autonomous tent villages across the city was
so colossal that even the conservative Sankei Shinbun the next day was
calling the city out, not for its violence and instrumental violence of
course, but for the cost of the policies!)

Osaka city has not learned a thing from this incident. Side by side with
its eviction of Utsubo park it attacked simultaneously four tents set up
at Ogimachi park for comrades made homeless from Utsubo, retributively
smashed a tent of a comrade participating in the actions against the
eviction in Nishi Umeda Park and established a perimeter fence in
Nishinari Kouen, from where many comrades had come to help those at Utsubo.

Comrades who arrived at Utsubo Park’s north administration office on the
31st to protest the eviction and demand their valuables were not allowed
in, turned away and then met with violence. The same day, the southern
administrative office of Nagai Kouen (in Osaka’s south) surrounded about
30 tent dwellers with eight cars and tried to destroy tents set up to
receive the dispossessed from Utsubo park.

On the first of February, the tourism promotion office continued their
prejudicial and targeting of squatters by issuing a document explaining
the evictions, claiming that ‘the tents and huts are not only harming
the scenery, but having a bad influence on the greenery and flowers;
drunk and disorderly squatters bring a bad and unsafe atmosphere to
surrounding citizens’.

Again, without touching on any of the violence executed by the employees
of the state or the guardsmen, the administration erected a fence late
at night the previous day, and in the midst of a protest against the men
trying to carry out the construction, one person was injured. The
administration takes this up and says ‘there is no way that violence can
be permitted’ etc. and cries as if it is the victim.

Osaka city, please, isn’t it your murderous policies that are the most
violent of all?

It makes us want to scream ‘Enough!’.

We will not allow this to continue unabated.

We demand that Osaka city halts its evictions and murders.

As long as this situation continues, and in order to protect the lives
and living standards of our comrades we communicate here that we will
carry on resisting.